Thursday, August 27, 2009

Cong plans defend-Nehru movement

Propaganda Wars

The sudden rise in the Congress decibel level was prompted by former RSS chief K S Sudarshan’s statement calling Jinnah secular. “Over the past 10 days the successors of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassins have been trying to distort history,” Tiwari said.

Ascribing the fullsome praise of Jinnah to the Sangh Parivar’s attempt to “secularise themselves by proxy”, he termed the Pakistan founder as a “British stooge” and claimed that nobody was more communal than him. “If somebody was responsible for Partition undoubtedly it was Jinnah,” he said.

Tiwari claimed that such approval of Jinnah could easily come from the BJP-RSS leadership because “they had no role in the freedom struggle”. He said these comments were a direct assault on the history of the freedom struggle. In the party’s estimate, Nehru was not just the chief architect of the modern Indian state but its ideological propagator as well. (via Cong plans defend-Nehru movement).

A ‘victorious’ Congress, ruling for most of the 60 years of post-colonial India, had three clear propaganda imperatives.

1 – TINA, There is no alternative

They needed to prove that it was only the Congress which could ‘take on’ and ‘defeat’ the ‘glorious and the mighty’ British Empire on which the sun never set. The logic went, “what could India(ns) have done without the Congress”. This thinking went deeper and dirtier, when a certain Deb Kant Barooah, declared “India is Indira and Indira is India.”

Similarly, Congress decided to re-write history and take all credit for the departure of the British colonialists. Contributions of leaders like SC Bose was ignored or the importance of the February 1946 joint action by the Indian Armed Forces against the colonial forces, was minimized to the ‘Naval Ratings Mutiny.’ Leaders like VD Savarkar (the first to write a non-colonial history of the War of 1857), or Shyama Prasad Mukherjee (the founder of the Jana Sangh-BJP) was dismissed as fascism.

Fact is, that Britain was bankrupt and could not hold onto India. Fact is, that for a 150 years – from 1797-1947, many rebellions, wars, individual hits were made against the colonial British Government. The myth of non-violent Indian freedom movement, served both colonial and Congress interests. It showed the British as ‘civilized’ colonialists – and the Congress as ‘enlightened’ leadership. Just like most Western literature caricatures African-American characters as hard-working, humble, docile, placid, obedient, gentle!

2 – If you don’t have an enemy, create one!

The Congress needed to create an enemy. A demon, who they could blame, use, abuse – and Pakistan fitted the bill perfectly. A failed state (!), a hotbed of terrorism – and to top it all, an Islamic State. What more could the West-Congress combine ask for?

Easily slipping into colonial legacy of ‘divide et impera’, the Congress went onto a disastrous foreign policy trail of Hindi-Chini bhai bhai. A solid realtionship with Pakistan would have, arguably, saved Tibet from the Chinese maws – which Nehru’s foreign policy predicated.

3 – Craven desires

To gain Western approval, acceptance, favours, privileges et al.

Consider the English language policy of the post-colonial Congress Government. It has massively subsidized English education in India so that the children of the elite could ‘escape’ to the West. The demeaning ‘population control theory’, the English language education – all, a result of this need of the Congress Party.

The deliberate colonial distortion of Indian history continues unchecked and unhindered. You only have to read Congress Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh’s speech at Oxford, praising the Raj, while receiving his honorary doctrate, or Chidambaram’s decision to end “abject poverty” in India that he seems to “have known for 5,000 years.”

When each of these elements are looked at in isolation, we can take benign view of these actions. When looked at collectively, it forms a clear pattern.

A rather ominous pattern.

No comments: